Ethnic cleansing in Bijeljina

Bijeljina is an interesting case study because it was one of a handful of municipalities in Bosnia that, except for a few days of fighting at the beginning of the war, the Serbs took over without opposition.

Examining what happened there during the war sheds light on the long-term political aims, as distinct from short-term military aims, of the Bosnian Serb leadership, because, unlike in other areas, the ethnic cleansing visited on the Muslim population cannot simply be dismissed as a side-effect of the fighting.

And Bijeljina was by the end of the war in 1995 thoroughly ethnically cleansed of Bosnian Muslims – much of this cleansing having been accomplished in 1992 – suggesting that an ethnically pure Republika Srpska (RS) was indeed the political aim of the Bosnian Serb leadership.

The ethnic cleansing was facilitated by killing, some of it during the takeover of the town when Serb paramilitaries did face opposition from the Muslim ‘Patriotic League’, but most of it when the town had already been secured and the Muslim population could not meaningfully be perceived as threatening Serb control of the town. A report by the influential Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, ‘Bijeljina’s Strange Silence over War Crimes’, notes that the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Centre found that 1,040 people were killed in Bijeljina during the war. The report fails to note that a large majority of this figure was actually Serb, presumably soldiers from the municipality killed on the nearby frontline, but still, some 300 Muslims were killed, which at about 1% of the municipality’s pre-war population is a substantial figure, probably enough to scare the rest of the population into leaving.

The ethnic cleansing of Bijeljina’s Muslims is described in the 2005 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) judgement against Momcilo Krajisnik, a senior member of the Bosnian Serb leadership.

According to this judgement, Serb paramilitaries, together with local MUP (Interior Ministry) forces, terrorised Muslims and some Serbs in Bijeljina in the months following the takeover. On 15 June the paramilitary leader Ljubisa Savic, known as Mauzer, stated that the presidency of SAO Semberija-Majevica (the region including Bijeljina and neighbouring municipalities) had decided that all Muslims in managerial positions would be fired if the “genocide” continued against Serbs elsewhere in the country. From July, Muslims in the town were subjected to looting and expulsion by the SDS. In this, Vojislav “Vojkan” Durkovic of the Bijeljina SDS was aided by Mauzer’s men. Muslim houses were then allocated to Serbs in exchange for a fee. “The Bijeljina SDS was determined to rid the municipality of its remaining Muslims”by killing a Muslim family on each side of town. The plan was implemented in September 1992 by a special police unit led by Dusko Malovic at the instigation of Drago Vukovic of the MUP. The Serb plan to rid Bijeljina of its Muslims also involved cutting off electricity, water and telephone lines to the homes of Muslims who refused to be mobilised and firing them, as well as forcing prominent Muslims to perform menial tasks. At least 52 people, mostly Muslims, were killed between April and September, on top of the at least 48 civilians killed during the takeover of the town.

This account of events in Bijeljina during 1992 is almost wholly taken from the witness statement and testimony of Milorad Davidovic, a policeman working for the Yugoslav Federal SUP (Secretariat for Internal Affairs) who was called in by the SDS leadership in July 1992 to help deal with problems caused by paramilitaries in Bijeljina, but soon forced out, probably because he was seen as being to rigorous.

The description of Djurkovic as “of the SDS” comes from Davidovic’s account. According to Davidovic’s witness statement Djurkovic “worked for the SDS as a field operative.” But the Krajisnik judgement does not explain Djurkovic’s role in the SDS in Bijeljina and fails to note that he was actually a member of the Party of Serbian Unity, which was headed by Arkan, the paramilitary leader active during the takeover of Bijeljina in early April 1992, setting in train the reign of terror continued by Djurkovic and Savic. Savic was a member of the SDS, but the relationship of both of these characters with the Bijeljina SDS leadership and the SDS leadership for the whole of RS is not fully explained.

The Krajisnik judgement also draws heavily from Davidovic’s account of a three-part SDS plan to ethnically cleanse Bijeljina of its Muslims. The plan involved: killing Muslim families in different parts of the city to scare the remaining Muslims away; firing Muslims who refused to respond to the call for mobilisation from their jobs and cutting off their utilities; and forcing prominent Muslims to perform menial tasks. The first and second parts of the plan were conducted by Drago Vukovic and his colleague Predrag Jesuric, while the third part “was the SDS policy,” thought up by a member of the SDS municipal main board. The link between the SDS and the first two parts of the plan is not explained, although Davidovic does say that he attended a meeting of the local SDS and crisis staff where the whole plan was discussed. Predrag Jesuric was according to Davidovic, “the main ideologue in the Bijeljina SDS”, but later in his witness statement Davidovic says, “I do not know if he was a member of the SDS.” Drago Vukovic’s connection with the SDS is not explained.

Those inclined to swallow Davidovic's account of events in Bijeljina whole should note that he  has described Mirko Blagojevic, a local Serb Radical Party and paramilitary leader who is named as one of members of the Joint Criminal Enterprise in the Krajisnik judgement as a “very positive character during the war in terms of protecting Muslims”. He also stated that the conflict in Bijeljina was “started by the Muslim forces that tried to provoke a clash.”

Nevertheless, Davidovic’s account is valuable and it is still the case that the SDS was the main political force in Bijeljina and presided over the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in 1992. There is little reason to doubt Davidovic’s claim that Milan Novakovic, an SDS deputy from Bijeljina elected in 1990, was close to the paramilitaries operating in Bijeljina, aware of their activities and unwilling to do anything about them. (Davidovic says that another elected SDS deputy from Bijeljina, Dragoljub Micic, was sympathetic to his attempts to halt the ethnic cleansing activities of the paramilitaries in Bijeljina.) His claim that members of the Bosnian SDS leadership such as Radovan Karadzic and Momcilo Krajisnik benefited from and knew about the looting activities of the Serb paramilitaries in Bijeljina is also very credible.

That the SDS leadership was heavily implicated in but not in full control of the ethnic cleansing of Bijeljina is also suggested by an Amnesty International Report from 1994, which describes Vojkan Djurkovic’s“Commission for the Exchange of Population”, established in 1992 to conduct ethnic cleansing operations, as “semi-official”, but later vying for power with other Serb factions in the area.

The Amnesty report also cites the claim by the human rights group the Humanitarian Law Fund that in 1993 the Bijeljina authorities said that they were implementing a policy of to reduce the municipality’s Muslim population to 5%. There is no smoking gun evidence of this kind in the ICTY account of events in Bijeljina in 1992, however.

The appeal judgement in the Krajisnik case adds to the impression that events in Bijeljina in 1992 may not have been the result of a plan to drive out the entire Muslim population. It notes that since each of the Serb crisis staffs included at least one Assembly deputy among its members the Bosnian Serb leadership exercised “a substantial amount of control over” the crisis staffs, but also that the initial judgement against Krajisnik “did not reach any general finding on the link between the Bosnian-Serb leadership and crisis staffs.”

Many far-fetched claims have been made about the wars in the former Yugoslavia, by all sides. Among these are the Serb claim that the exodus of Serbs from the Croatian Krajina region was part of a Croat plan for an ethnically pure Croatia and the Croat claim (outlined in Charles Shrader’s “The Muslim-Croat Civil War in Central Bosnia") that there was a Muslim plan to drive the Croat population out of central Bosnia. The claim that what happened in Bijeljina in 1992 was wholly the result of a plan to create an ethnically pure “Greater Serbia” also belongs in this category.